Why Is Scientific Illiteracy So Acceptable?

> The problem we have with COVID is the people journalists present to us as experts (invariably academics) keep saying incredibly dumb stuff that's totally wrong, and by now many of us have concluded these "experts" don't actually know any more about disease than the man on the street does.

It's not "what journalists say". Those people usually have valid credentials, e.g. when they are the people that developed the first PCR test for the new Coronavirus. I trust such people much more than random people on the street (or on the internet).

> The people you're disagreeing with also disagree about this. I've read a lot of epidemiology papers this year.

Forgive me if I don't find it terribly convincing that someone over the internet is trying to sell me something like this. Many fields of study are really hard to understand without a lot of context. There might be implicit things you might not be aware of. The internet is full of people who think they have found "flaws" in mathematical proofs or have discovered why FLT is true.

But you're also claiming that all the "experts" and all the relevant papers are from epidemiology whereas we also have a lot of contributions from other fields, such as virology or vaccinology.

Virologists have been instrumental in the debates relating to hygiene rules, the role that aerosols play for the infection, the different tests that exist and when/how they should be applied, what mutations mean or don't mean for infectiousness and immunity, and they can at least partially speak to why certain hypotheses that were observed empirically are not implausible from a biological point of view, or to how vaccines fundamentally work. They're also often in regular contact with practitioners on the field and can speak to the situation there, probably more so than random people on the street.

Here in Germany, virologists have very much been at the center of media attention (and not only of the media: the first PCR test for covid-19 was co-developed by Prof. Drosten who leads the virology department of the Charité clinic in Berlin).

> By all means, have blind faith in the credentialed classes. Just remember these are the same people who came up with critical race theory, every replication failure in the field of psychology, the decades of 180 degree turns in nutrition, etc.

As well as with countless examples of genuine scientific and technological progress. It's not that credentialed scientists are always right, it's that the scientific community (not so much individuals) is much more likely to be right than random people. And that doesn't mean that publication bias isn't a thing, but I'm not gonna hedge my bets on what some un-credentialed people are going to say because they looked at a bunch of papers.

edit: and I'll also mention that it seems you imply that scientists are a uniform bloc or that they all propose the same measures but that's not even true. But they do, largely, agree on some key issues, most notably, that this is a dangerous virus. It is my understanding that not even Tegnell (from Sweden) denies this.

At least in the English speaking media I hardly ever see virologists mentioned. However, maybe I should read some of their papers too then because basically all the advice around masks, lockdowns and so on has been proven wrong by observational data. Totally unclear why; perhaps there's some basic issue with germ theory. It seems unlikely but there aren't that many possible explanations. However these policies (the "non pharmaceutical interventions") have in the Anglosphere all been proposed by epidemiologists, not virologists.

Oh, the Drosten PCR test is under fresh fire today by a team in Denmark for having design issues, and of course we may observe the claim that PCR testing has no false positives must have come from either microbiology or virology (not that there's much difference).

the scientific community (not so much individuals) is much more likely to be right than random people

It's clear now that this isn't the case at all. The successes of physics and chemistry tell us nothing about fields like social psychology because the norms and practices within those fields are totally different. There is no "scientific community". Wildly different thresholds for statistical significance are one such difference that hits you immediately when comparing fields, but the issues are far deeper and more complex than just that.

Epidemiology is a pseudo-science. I've read so many papers by now that are just ludicrous and would never be accepted (I hope!) in more rigorous fields, that you can't really convince me by making vague allusions to the awesome powers of SCIENCE! Epidemiologists aren't wrong as random individuals, they are wrong as a bloc, as a set of institutions, as an entire field. That's exactly why peer review doesn't help: the papers are reviewed by peers who have standards just as low as the people they're reviewing. And unfortunately in academia, peer review is the only tool they have to catch problems.

But they do, largely, agree on some key issues, most notably, that this is a dangerous virus. It is my understanding that not even Tegnell (from Sweden) denies this.

That's a vague and unscientific statement, so sure, of course epidemiologists make it. "Dangerous" is entirely relative. Dangerous compared to what? Statistically it's about as bad as a bad flu wave, which is the sort of event that's been seen many times in the living memory of even quite young people. Most people wouldn't say that's dangerous, even though in some senses almost anything can be dangerous to some people. After all, lots of people die from drowning. Is water dangerous? In some contexts, sure. In others, no.